Mosaic Tiles and Mismatched curtains

It is one of those pleasant Bangalore evenings- cool with a hint of oncoming rain, and silence. I sit on the concrete ,once wooden bench in the compound of my grandfather’s house. The luxury of having a place to sit that is neither in, nor out. I am shaded by the roof above me but can also see the sky. Having the seclusion of a blank wall in front of me but also a view of the road to my left. The road, one of those idyllic cul-de-sacs, which used to have at least enough trees to give us food for countless tree-to-tree games. Now most of the trees are gone, but at least the coconut trees inside the compound of a few houses still stand. I remember collecting the tiny dried up ping-ping ball sized coconuts that fall down and playing with them.

In front of me is the tulsi plant with the miniature shrine. Painted a bright yellow by my grandfather a few years back, it is a reminder of how central it used to be in their lives of yesterday. A small one-and-a-half foot wide strip of ‘garden’ runs along the length of the compound, no fancy manicured lawns or exotic plants here. Just a homely mixed growth of green. In front of the spot where I am sitting used to be a banana tree – a bright vivid shade of green, exciting to a child’s eye .The hibiscus plant still stays, from which we used to try extracting and tasting the nectar.The old fashioned gate remains untouched as well, with its carved flowers and musical instruments, from where I have swung watching the going-ons of the road and the way the maid would wash the stone outside the gate with cowdung and draw a ‘kolam’ and make borders on the stone.

To my right is the garage. Having never owned a car but still owning a nice ten feet by twelve feet garage with a rolling shutter,  the garage doubles as a multipurpose store room for odds and ends, discarded furniture, a clothesline where the laundry was transferred when it rained, the odd scooter that a relative or a random uncle would leave temporarily. The garage had been a wonderful playroom for me, sitting on a chair that been converted into a swing, making tents out of bed sheets, spreading the same bed sheet on the floor for games of ludo, and getting fascinated by the operation of the rolling shutter and its heavy rattle. A tall wooden stool that also doubled as a ladder while taking things from the loft still stands there. It is now a pale yellow but it used to be painted a bright blue. Just like most of the other wooden things in this house- cane chairs, the window shutters, even the back door.

Each of the rooms used to be painted a different colour, and the colours used to also be changed each time the house was repainted, and the little peeled off bits of paint would reveal what the colour used to be, leaving you wondering how that room would have looked in the other colour. The ‘hall’ was a shade of blue somewhere between sky blue and cobalt blue. The main bedroom was green with cornice bands of lavender and pale yellow. I remember how this room permanently had a spare cot that was placed on its side at one end to save space. I would clamber on to the gap and pretend it was a witness stand and enact courthouse scenes.   The other room that had a view of the road , that was and is still called the ‘front room’ or ‘outside room’ when translated into English was painted a light purple , I fail to remember the colour of the dining room but I remember the foldable brown formica topped table with the oddly shaped chairs.  

The small kitchen with the cement counters, the bathroom, not to be confused with ‘toilet’ that was a separate entity, had a rough granite floor, ‘anti skid’ in today’s terms, and used to have a large ‘boiler’ that heated water.

The backyard , with the washing stone and built in grinding stone, and a small water tank that I have on occasion used as a swimming pool/bath tub, and the small outdoor ‘Indian toilet’ with once red-oxide flooring, the projected sil where I have sat many a time playing with the hooks that hold the wooden shutters in place and the rangoli powder that was always kept in this spot, the old quaint wooden sign bearing my grandfather’s name and the name of the bank where he worked, the uneven portions of the ground where water would collect during rains and where we would make paper boats, the common walls with the neighbouring houses which we would jump across while playing hide and seek...

The house may have had mismatched furniture haphazardly arranged leaving no space for movement and oddly coloured walls and doors and a cluttered showcase where objects went on display regardless of  aesthetic, but the memories overrule the absurdities -sometimes absurdities are what make  memories so much more vivid... 

On the boy who lived.

I started off to write about re-reading books and the joy of discovering a long-before read book, or simply an over-and-over-again read book that you happened to have not touched in around a year. There may be some books that have touched me, that always help in lifting a dull mood, many that may have been gripping enough to finish in one sitting, but the most re-read book is probably Harry Potter, the Boy who lived, the Chosen one.

Reading this book is like a chain reaction- I happen to open one of the seven when I have some time and no other new book around, and end up reading all of them in the next couple of weeks. There’s something about the way the characters get etched in your memory, the way you remember insignificant details about the book like the colour of Pansy Parkinson’s robes at the Yule Ball or the password to the gargoyle outside Dumbledore’s office. The way you can sometimes replay conversations and scenes in your head using almost the exact words, like Ron having the emotional range of a teaspoon or Hermionie ferociously dotting her ‘i’s and making holes in her parchment.

The amount of discussions the series sparked , whether at school, or years later with people who’s kids went to school, the intense debates, not on usual controversies or criticisms that books have but on ‘doubts’ in the plot, on how Malfoy got the Elder Wand and on how the time-turner worked and on why Dumbledore did what he did. The complexity of the plots, on how Scabbers looking thin was related to a prison breakout, on how Harry catching the Snitch in his mouth in his first match related to destroying a Horcrux, on how even seemingly insignificant chapters like the one on spring cleaning the Black house proved to hold important clues.

The competitions on who would read the book first as they released, and the sadistic thrill of telling someone who hasn’t yet finished it the ‘twist’ in the ending. (I had the misfortune of ‘being told’ rather than ‘telling’ all the major twists, that Sirius Black was not a killer, that Snape killed Dumbledore, and that Snape was innocent after all. Which didn’t actually make the books any less enjoyable!)

A book that actually contributed to a two-hour game of word building with ‘Harry Potter words’  during a long bus ride stuck in traffic , that also lead to a 500-odd comment game on Facebook , where we broke our heads getting stuck at Y after Yule Ball, Yew and Yaxley.

Growing up with Harry was quite memorable- reading about the twelve year old boy depressed on his birthday when we were twelve, seeing the first movie version of the book and endlessly complaining about the omissions and alterations, seeing whether the characters stood up to your imagined versions, waiting to see who the next Defence against the Dark Arts teachers were, watching Neville grow from awkwardly searching for his toad to being a true Gryffindor, cheering with the Weasley twins and crying as Dobby was buried, watching how every loose end tied up in the last book, and finally seeing the victory of good over evil.

The boy who lived indeed managed to live in many minds breaking barriers of age, genre and other ‘muggle’ classifications! 

The prevailing theme of the year- Nostalgia.

It seeps in through insignificant things. The smell of summer showers, passing though a mango cart, a certain song from ten years back, the sight of an Enid Blyton paperback. Maybe its because of all the ‘what’s next’ questions – What’s next was never a huge deal all these years. At least that’s how it feels now.

The ‘Next’ usually followed with minimum fuss- After 6^th standard came summer vacations and then 7^th standard. After school came play time and then homework time. After dinner came family television time.  After exams came excitement and water fights.

Whether we got bored of these patterns, I don’t really remember. But looking back, it seems an idyllic existence. Having actual hours in a school day allotted for games and music and reading, having annual school picnics and parties, having nothing too pressing to worry about except maybe the marks of the Hindi unit test or a minor squabble with one of the friends in the ‘group’. We may have not had the even more seemingly ‘idyllic’ childhood of a generation ahead with climbing mango trees and playing with tops and spending vacations at a ‘native place’ with a horde of cousins, but we had our own set of now outdated activities. Buying audiocassettes of new movies or albums, borrowing walkmans (walkmen?) for trips, reading horoscopes for the day at the back of the weight token at railway stations, playing brick games on a handheld ‘video game’ and sometimes being treated to the ones where you could shoot ducks on the TV from a ‘gun’. When we hadn’t a clue about pizzas and pastas and soufflés and the only main concession to our regular food was the occasional Maggi Noodles, and the only foreign cuisine we vaguely knew was Chinese . When we did have fancy board games and the occasional computer game but if just given a piece of chalk, could still pass a pleasant hour playing hopscotch. When we did watch a lot of cartoons but still ( at least most of us) loved Famous Fives and Secret Sevens and spent many a day exploring Cornish moors and secret underground passages with them. ( This of course, was before Harry Potter happened, which was soon to overtake most school conversations.)

I remember reading an Isaac Asimov short story about a time in the future when there is a man who ‘claims’ he can do things like multiplication without a calculator, and astonishes people by getting the right answer, and leading to the realisation that the brain can actually be a substitute to the computer.

In the hope that we don’t live to see that day, though nostalgic posts of twenty years hence might talk about the times we actually had to type on a keyboard, and how we used Facebook and Skype to communicate, and how we transferred data using things like memory cards and pen drives, the floppy disks of tomorrow, and how we played Angry Birds on touchphones, how we were fascinated by Siri, and how we still did quaint things like going to bookstores and buying printed books. 

A memory.

My earliest memories of my grandfather involve the large front verandah of our second floor house, the very first house I have lived in. I remember him sitting on the cane reclining chair we still have, while I rode around the verandah on a little red tricycle pretending it was an autorickshaw and asking him where he wanted to go. He would often take me for walks upto the railway track .We would sit on a bench watching the trains pass by, and I would jump about excitedly if anybody waved back from the train. Sometimes these walks would include a stop at a small departmental store where he would buy me ‘Gems’ chocolates. We called the shop ‘Kannaadi kade’, kannaadi meaning glass, as it was one of the rare shops that had huge tinted glass doors.

I would often play a form of ‘hide and seek’ with him, which involved him sitting on his mattress and me hiding in various parts of the small room and him finding me by pointing me out without moving. He taught me to play chess when I was merely five or six years old, I distinctly remember the chess board we used to have, a wooden box with light brown and ivory squares instead of the usual; black and white, and black and ivory magnetic coins. I remember sitting across him on the single bed by the window and trying to remember how the bishop moves and how the horse.

Once we shifted our house, his spot changed from the verandah to a small bench we had built at the front of the house. Dressed always in a spotless white dhoti and a neat shirt of light blue or grey, he would sit watching the activities of the road. He would still involve in games, with not just me but the other children of the road as well. I remember endless games of ‘King Queen Police Robber’ where we wrote on tiny chits and maintained strict score cards. We would also play board games- he would call out numbers when we played ‘Housie’, we played Scrabble and Uno and Snakes and Ladders.

Sometimes the whole family would play carrom- I remember his unique carrom strike, he would rest his hand on the board and flick the striker with his index finger, accurately pocketing the coins.

We would play brain games, twenty questions, quiz and memory games, he sometimes looked through my essays, spoke to me about the books he used to read when he was younger- Dickens, Wodehouse...

And then there was music. He was a self taught musician. Never had he attended classical music lessons, but he could identify a raga within ten seconds, and would constantly hum his own notes, quizzing me on identifying the raga as I grew older. I remember once during a power cut, he was in the house humming a tune and a neighbour came to enquire how our television was working despite the power cut, only to catch the live show.

Order and systems- even his retired life was governed by these. His time of waking up, duration of walking, reading the paper, his meals, his afternoon nap, everything he did was as though according to a never-wavering time table. Even in his later years, he would never fail to go to the bank on exactly the first of every month for his pension. And if ever he was going out of town, he would have his tiny suitcase packed and kept by the door at least a week in advance.

He was involved in my school life in ways I only appreciate now- he always undertook the responsibility of covering my new school books every year. It was an elaborate ritual, he would sit down with the brown paper, labels, scissors and tape and neatly wrap all the books and stick the label correctly aligned on the top right corner. He also undertook ironing of my school uniform, and having the white canvas shoes polished pure white ready on Mondays and Thursdays while the ‘black shoes’ shone with Kiwi Polish on the other days.

As I got more involved in school activities and studies and friends, the games and conversations reduced. But my grandfather managed to keep himself entertained in his own way- he would play Solitaire and Patience with a deck of playing cards sitting on his bed, he would sing as usual and often listen in when I practice correcting my pitching, he would religiously watch the same news on all the news channels, he would pass most days quite uneventfully but without complaint. He was not one for constantly visiting relatives or chatting with the neighbours. Of course, at home he would constantly bicker with my grandmother on trivial issues like writing the ration list, and when his daughters and grandchildren came to visit; he would get into a talkative mood, narrating nostalgic stories. But otherwise, he generally appeared as a silent and dignified person, earning the respect of all around.

And so he remains in our memories, a person respected by all. I continue to picture him sitting on the verandah peacefully everytime I hear one of his favourite songs-‘Endaro Mahanubavulu Andariki Vandanumulu’ , translating to ‘There are many great men, to all of them my salutations’. A fitting tribute

Waking up to peace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjMs_imWkFM&feature=related

Song- Vellai pookal

Composed and sung- A R Rahman

Lyrics - Vairamuthu

Translation - http://www.mail-archive.com/arrahmanfans@yahoogroups.com/msg39132.html

I don’t usually concentrate on the lyrics of songs. There seems to be a part of my brain that blocks out attempting to find out meaning in a song. But this is one song who’s lyrics hit me each time I listen to them.

It brings out the yearning those affected by war have for peace. Something that most of us absolutely take for granted. Being victimised for no justifiable reason. Whether it is our freedom fighters struggling against the British or the ‘blacks’ against the ‘whites’.

We may be waking up everyday, as the song describes, to the blooming of white flowers and the warmth of the yellow sunlight on the sand. Most of us are not directly affected by struggles such as war and genocide and denial of basic human rights. Our preoccupied minds may allow us to stop and feel a little sympathy for the victims who we read about in books and newspapers or see shedding tears to the reporter on a news channel or in a movie.

But rarely do we appreciate the very fact that we are able to live without fear. Not fear of being unsuccessful to impress a client or a boss at a meeting, or of failure to be at the top, or of losing an important upcoming match. But fear of having to fight to live as a normal human being with another human being. Being caught in the war somebody else is having with somebody else.

While we go about or daily work with all our frustrations and complaints, there are the vast number of people who live in this fear. The soldiers, their families, innocent people who just happen to live in a place witnessing weekly bomb blasts, children who still wake up to the sound of gunfire echoing in their heads even after the shooting is long gone.

We may not change after reading or writing such thoughts, we will still go about our lives laughing with the good times and complaining bitterly about the bad. We may not become great patriots or leaders. But one of those days when we begin to wallow in self pity and curse our lives, we could stop to appreciate the freedom we are blessed with, and value every minute that we are able to live without fear.

Keeping it alive.

Writing this post as I realised it'll soon be Feb 2011, and a year of keeping my blog inactive makes it worthy of being deleted...

Interesting(to me) point -Since the title of this blog is Nothing Significant, maybe the fact that I didn't write for a whole year contradictorily ( Wow, I tried that put for the first time and it didn't get a red squiggly line under it so I'm assuming its a word) means that there have been significant events transpiring, which is why nothing was worthy of coming under this blog, as what I'm currently writing is ? (Yes, that's a long sentence. )

Talking about writing- the physical act of writing is something I quite enjoy. I mean, the act of taking a pen and letting it flow on a blank paper, making long loopy 'y's and 'g's, making neat commas, making a cursive capital 'A' with a flourish. Putting a triumphant full stop after writing a sentence to satisfaction. ( Hitting the full stop key hard enough to break the keyboard doesn't amount to the same!) The only reason I sometimes write notes in class is for this, for seeing physical blank pages fill with physical writing, for having 'j's going below the line and 'h's above.

(Of course, I still prefer submitting assignments in print, but that's a different issue).

Talking about handwriting brings back memories of school, where it was a huge issue. We'd graduated from the four lined notebooks and practicing pages of Gg and Tt and progressed to writing ten line answers from English lessons, when we had a new teacher who insisted that our writing wasn't 'cursive' enough, and we were back to writing for handwriting's sake. And those were the days when we had prizes at the end of the year for things like handwriting. (And yes, i won it much to the surprise of my mother who always thought it was untidy. )

Talking about English lessons also reminds me of, well English lessons. I had one in Primary School about children in class who spilt somebody's lunch, and the questions would go- Q.Who spilt the water A.Tom spilt the water. Q. Who's water was it? A. It was Bess's water. And that was the reason my parents decided i should change schools.

Ironically, after a lot of good English lessons for the next few years, after Julius Caesar, after unforgettable poems like Strange Meeting and Ode on the Death of a Favourite cat, after analysis of short stories like The Postmaster and War, come IIPUC and we were back to 'What was the name of the cat in the poem I Forget the Name', and 'How many litres of milk did the cow give in a week.'. And if things could get worse, the year after that we had to make lists of homophones and homonyms after a wrong explanation of what both were.

Now, its come to even lesser than that, to random posts once a year, and letters to the principal for whoever requires them. Sigh.

What happens on boring Tuesdays morning.

A two hour lecture on that one... and what do you expect ?

Pages filled with 'sketches' ( doodles), election symbols for every individual in class, designing christmas stockings with special fireplaces, the less creative 'noughts and crosses' ( no offence meant), and sometimes, valuable poetry.

The Walnut and the Apricot

( In memory of The Walrus and the Carpenter. )

( ah.. those ICSE days. )

( Inspired by the two famous users of the walnut and apricot flavoured cosmetic item respectively)

( Warning, may not sound funny for those who don't know the context)

Again,

The Walnut and the Apricot.

Said the walnut to the apricot,

"Shall we go to the spa?"

Said the apricot to the walnut,

"Sure, as foot size no bar"

So off went the walnut and the apricot,

dressed in purple and pink.

Faces scrubbed and hair combed,

Teeth brushed to the brink.

For seven days and seven nights,

they marched forth courageously.

For they knew that at the end of the journey,

Beauty would smile upon them instantaneously.

On the journey, they encountered,

A maiden, Fair and Lovely. .

She blushed and batted eyelashes at them,

and told them she was lonely.

Asked the duo to the maiden,

"What is the secret to your beauty?

The glowing skin, the radiance..

Is it your facewash, gentle and fruity ?...

Your skin is as fair as fair can get,

Your locks as silken as silk.

Your feet as tiny as Apricot's can get,

Is it because of Strawberry milk ? "

Said the maiden to the duo,

" My beauty cannot match yours,

Your faces, aglow with pink.

I don't know if its the facewash'

But it sure does stink!